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Red Hat CEO Publishes Open Source Management Memoir
ectoman writes: Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has just published The Open Organization, a book that chronicles his tenure as leader of the world's largest open source company. The book aims to show other business leaders how open source principles like transparency, authenticity, access, and openness can enhance their organizations. It's also filled with information about daily life inside Red Hat. Whitehurst joined Red Hat in 2008 after leaving Delta Airlines, and he says his time working in open source has changed him. "I thought I knew what it took to manage people and get work done," he writes in The Open Organization. "But the techniques I had learned, the traditional beliefs I held for management and how people are taught to run companies and lead organizations, were to be challenged when I entered the world of Red Hat and open source." All proceeds from the book benefit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Opensource.com is hosting free book club materials.
Yeah.
Funny thing about computers. They change.
My first Redhat install was on a 486 and the linux world at the time was throwing an absolute shit-fit over the cataclysmic changes in kernel 2.0. Redhat was the devil for embracing it and it was going to be the end of Linux, Redhat, and everything opensource.
That was in 96, and here we have people spewing the same bullshit. It's been almost 20 years. Linux has eclipsed /every/ commercial Unix and Redhat is one of the most important OS vendors in the world. Period.
You're wrong.
Linux is moving on.
Please, for once in your life:
Shut. The. Fuck. Up.
One of the things that bothers me about books like this is how they become primary reference material for MBAs and managers. I've lost count of how many times managers have referenced "Good to Great" or Jack Welch's book to implement very questionable policies. Some guy waxing poetic on what a wonderful job he's done is a lot different from a rigorous study.
One real world example about anecdotal evidence shaping global HR policy is the Google "open floor plan" office trend. Our company is moving from semi-private cubes and offices to a hideous Google-style design. This is for a professional services company where most people require quiet, and are taking phone calls and working on individual/small group projects, not for a software startup. We and countless other companies are doing this simply because Google does it, and has published many articles on how wonderful it is. Evidence is coming out against this (increased sick time, loss of concentration, people hating their co-workers more, etc.) but damnit, if it works for Google it must be right.
You missed an important point of the guy you replied to. Debian *did* eventually adopt the 2.0 kernel (and all subsequent versions). Did Debian's adoption of the "devilish" 2.0 kernel cause FreeBSD (or whatever your favorite alternative is) to take off?
How about the adoption of PulseAudio? Maybe I missed the memo and there's some other desktop distro out there that didn't adopt PulseAudio that has millions of users, but last I checked, Ubuntu is still the most popular desktop distro by a wide margin, despite an enormous backlash against PulseAudio. Even the second, third and fourth-place distros -- Fedora, OpenSUSE and Arch, in no particular order -- all ship PulseAudio by default, and have many core desktop packages that explicitly depend on PulseAudio components.
It's the same story over and over again:
1. Red Hat introduces some new technology or disruptive change.
2. A minority of the people actively embrace it; the vast majority accept it somewhat reluctantly and go with the flow; and an even smaller minority vocally proclaim from the top of the mountains that any change that requires them to learn new console commands is simply unacceptable because what they have is working just fine for them, thanks.
3. As the software stabilizes and comes to incorporate exhaustively every possible feature and use case of whatever it is designed to replace or obsolete, the people who were reluctant but open-minded become converts who embrace and actively appreciate the new solution.
4. The aforementioned vocal minority of opponents continue to wail away tirelessly and threaten to move to another platform, while quietly adopting and learning the new platform because whatever they tried to move to wasn't good enough for their needs.
If this were *false*, then the installed base of distros like Debian and RHEL and OpenSUSE would look extremely different in 2015 compared to other UNIXes and other distros. However, the leadership of Debian/RHEL/Ubuntu/(Open)SUSE continues to be evident in all the numbers, so the people who seem to perceive some kind of a groundswell of shifting users are just projecting their own preferences onto a group of people who aren't actually doing the same thing they're doing.
And the "actual" so-called FreeBSD adopters will probably return to GNU/Linux within a year or two, anyway. Bet on it.
Dear mentally challenged individual. It has apparently not come to your attention, but systemd is used by almost every major Linux distribution on the planet. Isn't it strange that all these companies made that same peculiar decision. Clearly they didn't consult you or they would have known that systemd is a Red Hat product!
Tell us more about this war going on in your head!
Yes, Red Hats proprietary Open Source solutions! Congratulations, you just announced to the world that you have been reading Slashdot for more than a decade (See his SlashID Number for those following along) and still don't know the frigging difference between proprietary and FOSS. Bravo. I don't think I could come up with something that phenomenally stupid to say if I spent weeks at it!
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun